Apple offers developers new Tiger, Java software builds

More recent builds of Apple\'s Tiger operating system have recently surfaced along with a coinciding Java software seed.

According to reports, Apple late last week seeded its Apple Developer Connection members with build 8A369 of Mac OS X 10.4 \"Tiger,\" the company\'s next-generation operating system due this spring.

Like recent seeds, this build is believed to be a recent compile of the Tiger OS, but not one that necessarily ties in all of latest developments associated with the project.

In a four page seed note accompanying the build, Apple did not specify areas of the system for developers to diagnose, nor did it offer a list of recent improvements. Instead, sources said the note focuses on known issues, listing over a dozen and a half bugs that are being addressed.

Some of these outstanding bugs pertain to archive installs over Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, ill-rendered application windows upon return from system inactivity, setup assistant sluggishness, and incomplete Spotlight indexing.

Sources also tell AppleInsider that Apple is once again offering its software testers a choice of receiving Tiger builds on either CD or DVD. It remains unclear on which form of optical media Tiger will ship. Current builds of Tiger list a DVD drive as a system requirement.

Along with the latest Tiger build, Apple also offered some of its developers a limited distribution pre-release of J2SE 5.0. Now in the fourth iteration of its \'preview\' phase, J2SE 5.0 is an implementation of the latest version of Java that is under development specifically for Tiger.

Based on Sun\'s J2SE 5.0 Update 1, the release offers a new Java Tools interface, execution of double clickable applications, several ease of development changes to the Java language, new concurrency utilities, and a JVM Monitoring & Management API.

This latest seed of J2SE 5.0 requires the aforementioned Tiger build. Apple also warned that the software has received only limited testing and carries a list of known issues.